Honey bees use social information in waggle dances more fully when foraging errors are more costly

Abstract

Social animals can obtain valuable information from group members, but sometimes experience conflicts between this social information and personal information obtained through their own experience. Experienced honey bee foragers (Apis mellifera) have personal information about familiar food sources, and can also obtain social information by following waggle dances. However, it is unclear whether temporarily unemployed foragers whose visits to a food source have been interrupted make full use of social information from dancers or rely primarily on their own personal information to determine whether their familiar food source is active again. We hypothesized that experienced foragers should pay more attention to the social information in waggle dances when foraging errors that can arise from ignoring social information are more costly. We manipulated the cost of mistakenly flying to a familiar but unprofitable food source by training bees to visit feeders that were either close (100 m) or far (1000 m) from the hive and found that temporarily unemployed foragers who had been trained to forage at more distant feeders were more likely to pay attention to social information about food source location. Our findings demonstrate that experienced forager bees can flexibly alter the extent to which they rely on social, as opposed to personal, information and are more likely to fully utilize social information from dancers when foraging errors are more costly.

Dancing Bees Improve Colony Foraging Success as Long-Term Benefits Outweigh Short-Term Costs

“…Our findings help to explain the puzzling observation that experienced foragers following dances frequently ignore spatial waggle dance information [29], [69]–[74]. Our results show that foragers should continue to visit familiar food sources if these remain profitable in order to avoid recruitment costs and the lower benefits of individual exploration [23], [24], [60].…”

Competition for resources can explain patterns of social and individual learning in nature

“…Sticklebacks (Pungitius pungitius), for example, use individual learning to make foraging decisions when competition is high, but rely almost entirely on social learning when competition is low [36]. Honeybees (Apis mellifera) rely heavily on social information when foraging resources are unevenly distributed and are more likely to use individual information when resources are evenly distributed [20]. Foraging returns for rats (Rattus norvegicus) are likely to be highly variable because some potential food items are harmful or fatal, and rats exhibit strong preferences for socially learned food items [37].…”

“…Previous models have shown that the fitness of learning strategies is frequency-dependent [6]. Although these models generate the mixed-learning strategies seen in nature, there is little empirical evidence for either the costs or low fidelity of social learning when compared with individual learning [20][21][22]. Thus, the wide use of individual learning in nature remains poorly explained.…”

Honeybee foragers adjust crop contents before leaving the hive

“…We sampled the most active followers among many followers attending to a dancer. This method might have helped us to avoid sampling bees that would ignore dance information because bees that have followed waggle runs many times (and so appear to be especially active in dance following) tend to use dance information (Wray et al 2011).…”